Understanding Higher Education Enrolment Through Michel Foucault’s Biopolitics

Higher education enrolment is and has historically been a demographic-political problem around the world over the last four decades. This can be reflected in many governments’ attempts to widen university access to make their national populations more skilled and productive. Most extant research on this matter investigates the effectiveness of such enrolment policies in addressing the problems outlined by governments. However, I noticed that the enrolment problems were not simply about achieving greater student participation; rather, the enrolment ‘problem’ is tied up with the formation of modern statehood and the subjectivities of national populations. In this chapter, I suggest drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand how higher education enrolment has become an object linked to population characteristics and political legitimacy. I use the historical higher education enrolment concerns of Australia and OECD as case studies to explore how specific ideas conceive unique ‘problems’. More importantly, I point to how we can reimagine the landscape of higher education centred on the participation of students from different backgrounds through the perspective of biopolitics.